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For this blog entry, I will explain my experiences with email alerts and how I incorporated them into my term project on the music industry. I used a variety of email alerts including; a Google Alert on the search query terms "music industry," as well as email alerts and email subscriptions that were offered by interesting, music industry-related web pages I found while browsing the web.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great and easy way to take advantage of email alerts and stay up-to-date on information pertaining to a certain subject of interest. How it works is simple? You entered search query terms into the box just as you would under any Google search. These results page for these search terms is what you are actually monitoring. Whenever Google News submits a query with these search terms (instantly, daily, or weekly, depending on the option you choose), you receive a message in your email inbox regarding any changes made to this search query results page. An additional option is to have this email alert instead go to a feed reader as opposed to your inbox. This may be the preferable feature for you if you don't want your email inbox to be cluttered.

Project Resources

Here is a list of useful web pages (including my Google Alert for the "music industry") which provide email alert features or subscriptions that routinely send music industry related news and information to my email inbox. I set these email alerts up so that I was sent either daily, weekly, or monthly updates in the form of emails.

This is an email alert you can subscribe to that is offered by Bnet.com. The email alert provides updates on changes to the search engine results when you search Bnet.com for "music". Many of the news links provided by the search are useful and have relevant information pertaining to the music recording industry.

This email list subscription gives you access to news & analysis, insider commentary, interviews, musician career tips and hundreds of reviews. A subscription from this site and of this nature would be very helpful to smaller artists and industry players that want to stay informed and potentially make a name for themselves.

This email alert is an EIN news service for music industry professionals. News items provided through this email alert are generally about specific artists within the industry. The site also includes many news stories that have an international scope as well.

This email alert is for updating you on news stories as they relate to urban music. This site has a younger, more artistic vibe, and shares news stories that give a bit of an alternate perspective on the music industry.

This Latin American music news site has an email alert feature in which you can subscribe to. Though not especially usual for my project, anyone with an interest in the Latin American music scene should know of this site. It provides a lot of different news stories in regards to Latin music and Spanish artists.

My Thoughts

After thinking about my experiences with email alerts, I found them to lie somewhere between RSS feeds and page monitors in terms of their usefulness and overall qualities. On one hand, the email alerts were a bit more organized and easier to use than page monitors. On the other hand, I still didn't like the fact that most of this information was going to my email account and mixing in with my other stuff.

Throughout my researching and browsing of the web, I found that most all the sites I wanted to use had an email alert feature, if not an RSS feed. This was nice because I didn't have to waste time setting up any page monitors or other such things. I would recommend users interested in the music industry take advantage of some of the email alerts I have listed. They provide a great source of information and are the next best option when RSS feeds are not available.